"Fight for your lives before it's someone else's job."
Those were the final words Emma Gonzalez spoke last Saturday after standing on stage, most of it silent, before a rapt audience for six minutes and 20 seconds—the brief time it took for the shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to claim 17 young lives.
If there's one thing that's uniquely responsible for how the Parkland kids have turned the gun debate on its head since that tragic February 14 massacre, it's the sense of national urgency they have inspired around the #NeverAgain movement. Every second counts to them. Every minute that fails to produce better gun safety laws is another minute in which they and other students and citizens across the country might become the next victim who loses their life at the wrong end of a gun.
Urgency is hallmark of every great movement that manages to change the course of history—from the movements for women's suffrage and civil rights to the anti-war movement. But for me, as a lesbian and a journalist who documented the LGBTQ movement during its march toward marriage equality, "Fight for your lives before it's someone else's job" sounded very reminiscent of the "Silence = Death" rallying cry of AIDS activists in the '80s and '90s. During that period, the group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) not only led one of the most successful efforts to spur government action and tame a deadly scourge in the last several decades, it also arguably laid the groundwork for the marriage equality movement.
In many ways, Silence = Death was the motto that gave birth to a generation of queer activists who saw coming out to their peers as an existential imperative, not simply a choice. That spurred a national conversation and visibility for LGBTQ Americans that would ultimately transform attitudes about same-sex marriage in little more than a decade after anti-gay marriage amendments swept the nation in the mid-aughts.
From where I sit, the #NeverAgain movement is now showing promise that it can similarly stun pollsters and shock politicians with its rapid transformation of both public opinion and political norms. Of all the fierce progressive movements we’ve seen take flight in the last decade, not one of them bears more resemblance to the things that helped the marriage equality movement succeed than the #NeverAgain movement does. That is not to say that all the progressive movements for basic human dignity don't have their own individual strengths or to preference any one of those important efforts over another. It is only to say that I see the greatest similarities between #NeverAgain and the last several decades of LGBTQ activism.
One of those attributes I alluded to above is a generational shift in thinking that pollsters are typically unable to gauge until it is upon us. As many young #NeverAgain activists have made clear over the past month, they are a generation that has never known what it’s like to not fear gun violence at school. As the Washington Post found, more than 187,000 students have been exposed to gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine massacre, and that’s likely an undercount. Nor does it account for the violence that many kids of color experience on the way to and from school. But the students’ fundamental assertion that their lives and their right to live them free from terror transcend the right of gun ownership (especially guns not used for self-defense or hunting) is morally unimpeachable to anyone who isn’t a rabid gun enthusiast. And by “rabid,” I don’t mean everyone who owns a gun. I’m talking about the three percent of American adults who own a collective 133 million firearms, accounting for about half of all the guns in America.
Another big similarity is reach. Gun violence in America affects people of every race, gender, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic level and sexual orientation—even if it affects them disproportionately. Similar to the LGBTQ movement, #NeverAgain has the makings of being a cross cultural movement. That may not mean that everyone agrees on the same strategy or the exact same legislative goals (certainly transgender, lesbian, and gay activists didn't and still don't). But the new anti-gun violence activists can generally agree that a reduction in guns and access to guns will lead to a reduction in gun violence. The important point is that a coalition of people from different races, genders, cultures, ethnicities, and religions are moving in a similar direction even it's not perfectly monolithic. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this shared imperative—nothing creates movement quite like the collective energy of an eclectic mix of villages pushing something forward. And similar to the LGBTQ movement, the #NeverAgain activists are starting to make an inroads with at least some Republican voters, if not GOP lawmakers yet. In particular, the same suburban women who are crossing party lines to vote against Donald Trump and the GOP would also like to see reasonable gun restrictions enacted. When it comes time to pass legislation, #NeverAgain activists will need at least some Republican votes, even if it’s only a handful or less.
At the same time that the #NeverAgain movement bears similarities to the LGBTQ movement, it also doesn’t face some of same obstacles that other movements have. As grim as this is to write, the predominantly white upper-middle class Parkland students don’t have the same challenge of convincing the nation that their lives matter or that their experience is worthy that movements like Black Lives Matter have or AIDS activists once did. In fact, Black Lives Matter activists have been fighting gun violence for years. The resonance that Parkland activists have achieved in such a short amount of time is purely a function of straight white privilege (especially the white part), but it helps their case nonetheless. They also don’t have to convince the public that school shootings are real and that the status quo isn’t working. That much is evident even if people have disagreed about how to fix. That differs from marriage equality, for instance, in that lesbian and gay activists had to convince Americans that the status quo wasn’t working, which was a challenge because the inequity affected such a small percentage of the population. But again, the cross-cultural nature of the LGBTQ movement helped make up for our relatively small numbers.
This new student movement has already shown promise that we haven’t seen since school massacres entered our collective conscience, starting with Columbine for many of us (though the 1998 shooting of five people in Jonesboro, Arkansas, preceded it). Last weekend, as kids of all colors and creeds spoke their truth from the stage, March For Our Lives boasted attendance numbers that potentially made it the biggest single-day protest ever in D.C. But even if the estimated 800,000 was an over count, the massive crowd certainly put the movement on similar footing to last year’s Women’s March (500,000), the 1995 Million Man March (450,000-1.1 million), and the 1969 demonstration against the Vietnam War (500,000-600,000).
We have also watched major corporations decide that aligning themselves with the NRA or otherwise against the student activists isn’t in their long-term interests. From banks and insurance companies to airlines and travel companies, they have concluded that the NRA isn’t good for business. This, by the way, is a conclusion that many major corporations have also reached about cities and states that have enacted virulent anti-gay and transphobic legislation—it’s not good for business. To boot, Parkland activist David Hogg destroyed conservative commentator Laura Ingraham this week after she mocked Hogg during her Fox News show, The Ingraham Angle. After nearly 20 major brands pulled their advertising from her show, she announced Friday night that she’ll be taking a break next week.
The momentum corresponds with positive trend lines now emerging on the basic question of whether people support stricter gun laws, a question Gallup has been asking since the 90s.
We may be witnessing a moment to remember. These kids believe that they are somebody and that they can make change happen—like the suffragettes at the turn of the last century, the civil rights activists of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and LGBTQ activists at the turn of this century. They believe, and as activist and journalist Mike Signorile pointed out, we owe it to them and ourselves to believe too. And I do.
Kerry Eleveld is the author of Don’t Tell Me To Wait: How the fight for gay rights changed America and transformed Obama’s presidency.